Hams want analog to solve something, but it’s a dead protocol walking. Satellite cellular will make all of this obsolete within 5 years. At that point any adventure use case becomes an app.
HAM radio has basically been middle-aged men tinkering with their toys and chatting in the over-the-air equivalent of IRC for decades now. All the emergency and research stuff is basically just LARPing.
But that doesn't mean it is obsolete. They're enjoying building this, and that's perfectly fine. Everyone is entitled to their own odd hobbies. Just... don't expect to be able to rely on it in an actual emergency.
Used to live in a city where the ham radio group was actively involved in and integrated into the city’s emergency response plans.
Their muster sites for a major disaster had at least 50% of their space dedicated to radio equipment. Every community center had equipment installed on site. There was a large radio room in the regional emergency operations center building, a wackload of antennas on the roof, and a dedicated desk for the group in the main EOC room.
The city paid for me to attend multi-day courses where some of the other 12 people in the room were “the chief of the fire department”.
The group, internally, ran a multitude of training programs to ensure the people responding would be able to handle the tasks they would need to do. During some day-long simulations to test the emergency response, the city explicitly called a communications blackout to simulate all phone and other communication systems going dark and validate the capabilities of the radio group.
There’s still a lot of value in amateur radio in an emergency… with an organized, trained group of people. Which across the multitude of places I’ve lived I’ve only ever come across once.
So yeah, mostly just LARPing.
(As a maybe-interesting side note… The average age in that group was substantially lower than anywhere else I’ve dropped in on a radio group as well.)
> All the emergency and research stuff is basically just LARPing.
Today that is possibly true. But back in the 1990's when I was really active, I did pass health and welfare traffic during a natural disaster. And probably the coolest thing, I provided a phone patch for a missionary in Africa, to call his home in Virginia.
Now with the prevalence of the internet and cell phones... yeah, probably just LARPing.
Don’t see this as any different than amateur programmers releasing another framework. Already established norms, will very likely never take off, but a great way for a person to learn a hobby with real world experience —- in this case radio instead of a programming language.
There’s definitely those “when shit hits the fan” prepper types but outside rural US hams it’s not the norm worldwide. They’re a certainly deluded group.
